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White House Website Switches To Open Source
Falc0n writes "WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software. Dries Buytaert reflected on this, adding: 'this is a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal.'"
If some of the people who post here were as smart as they think they are, they'd figure out:
* Whitehouse.gov is not running Drupal on a ten-dollar shared server at GoDaddy.com.
* Building and maintaining a large, continuously updated website is not something you do in a weekend with Notepad, a giant bag of Cheetos, and a case of diet Coke.
* Any Drupal project of this scale involves layers of extremely high-performance caching and multiple firewalls.
* The site's administrative tools aren't available from the outside. (This is not difficult to implement.)
* Life does not begin and end with your personal favorite programming language, database server, etc., or with the boundaries of your parents' basement.
* Security reports are reports of vulnerabilities that have been fixed, not vulnerabilities that lie in wait to ambush your site. A properly run open-source project has a documented process for handling security issues.
I don't know any details of the site's technical architecture beyond the obvious, but it's blazingly fast. My bet is that when you hit the site, you're pulling completed pages out of RAM on a customized and hardened Varnish, but that's just a guess. The HTTP headers identify the server technology as "White House."
With all due respect, are you a web developer?
For starters, a well-developed CMS and some competent IT people can produce a site every bit as quick as a static HTML site, because that's exactly what they'll be serving up with good server-side caching. Any "weight" in the backend is more than offset by the increased ease with which content can be updated.
Moreover, a CMS allows non-technical people to be involved in the process. Most likely, people from the press and communications offices are going to be the ones in charge of the content on this website, and it's not at all unreasonable to assume that most of them aren't going to be any good with HTML.
And why should they be? CMS is exactly what it says it is -- a content management system, letting people focus on content by hiding away the markup and technical nonsense they're not concerned with anyway. Sometimes it's fully inappopriate; sometimes a custom one is better than off-the-shelf. But you really can't see why anybody would want to use one? Ever?
Actually most people have been praising Drupal for its excellent security. You aren't going to find a CMS with a much better track record than Drupal.
What they were mainly saying is that Drupal is extremely popular with lots of people looking to exploit it, so it might theoretically be a high risk. A less well known CMS would not have many people looking (well, that would definitely change overnight if whitehouse.gov chose it :) and is therfore a lower risk, but also has tons of exploits not found yet.
Stick with Drupal if you want a tested, secure, and reliable CMS.